The Light at the End of the Tunnel - Sermon

The Light at the End of the Tunnel

22 Aug 2010

Last Sunday I was jumping around up here. When I am exited I get animated. I was excited not least because I was nearly finished a difficult paper that I have been researching since May; but also because as I drew the research to a close I read N.T. Wright’s ‘Surprised by Hope.’ It is about what the resurrection means to us today.  In many senses it was the light at the end of the tunnel and I was pumped by it!

While up here I was being teased and encouraged to let some of this animation flow into my preaching. I assured the people involved it would happen; I mean how can someone excitable like me and with a Pentecostal background keep still for long?

Unfortunately though, it may just have to wait until I can let go of clutching onto this music stand!

I have always been a mover, hands, feet and body I just have to fully express myself.  But 8 years ago this week I had an accident at work which nearly put paid to that.  I ended up in bed for 8 months with Dr.’s telling me I may end up in a wheelchair.  The slightest movement was painful.

So when I read Luke’s account of the woman in the synagogue I actually knew something of what she had gone through.

Can you imagine, she’s been hobbling around bent over double for 18 years!

Then all of a sudden and out of the blue Jesus sees her, has compassion and with one touch and one sentence she’s standing up straight!

It says she began glorifying God.

Do you think she was quiet in this, raised her hand a little and said “Thank you Lord. You are wonderful” and then went on and carried on life as usual?

No way!

She’s been shuffling round staring at the ground for 18 years!

She’s going to be running all over the place, jumping up and down shouting and waving her hands in the air;

“Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Praise God! Praise God! Look what He’s done! Rabbi Yeshua laid hands on me and freed me from my sickness! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”

Of course the synagogue officials weren’t too happy about this. I mean here is this woman disrupting their religious service, running around shouting and acting with no dignity in YHWH’s house.

But what is worse is that upstart Rabbi Yeshua has broken Sabbath rules. He has flagrantly gone against their interpretation of Torah.

Please note – it is not that they don’t believe that God heals. It’s not that they don’t think a Rabbi should be involved in God healing His people. No; The problem is they see it as work! And Sabbath is not for work!

They’d got to the point where they thought their religious fannigans were more important than people; more important than recognising Emmanuel; God in our midst.

It’s not as if they didn’t know.  They knew the Torah and the writings of the Prophets off by heart. They knew the verses we looked at in Isaiah, but they got mixed up, thinking when God said honour the Sabbath by refusing business as usual it included all the stuff He’d just told them to do – not gossiping, not pointing the finger of blame, but being generous to the hungry, satisfying the desires of the afflicted. It was like they could only do good the rest of the week!

But, here was Jesus, doing just that, and on the Sabbath. He satisfied the desire of this afflicted woman; now she is able to go hug her family, she is able to be a full part of the community. Suddenly she is able to live fully.

Let’s not be too hard on these religious guys; they were waiting for this too. They just thought they knew what it was going to look like.  Jesus didn’t fit the picture, and the things He did didn’t fit their picture either. 

But look Jesus doesn’t say you evil people, you have no faith.  He just shows them where their mistake is.

He says hey you satisfy the needs of your animals on the Sabbath; so why are you making Sabbath more important than this daughter of Abraham’s needs?

That must have stung! Here they are treating their animals better that one of God’s people who is heir to God’s promises.

Jesus told people many times that the Kingdom of God was at hand or near.  He told His disciples He had come to bring abundant life.  Here is a living example of what the abundant life that Jesus heralding in the Kingdom of God brings.

The trouble that these synagogue officials had was they thought they knew how God would fulfill His promises.  They thought He’d send a Messiah who would fight and win a battle with the pagan oppressors and then life would be good because Israel would be restored; then they could live a bit and then they’d die and sometime later they’d all get resurrected on the final day and God would bring in His new creation. Simple!

But God didn’t do it that way.  He sent a Messiah who heralded in the Kingdom of God and the new creation by healing the sick, delivering those who were oppressed, raising people from the dead. What Jesus did was a foretaste of what is to come.  It was to whet our appetites for God’s Kingdom.  Then He himself overcame death by being resurrected; that is raised bodily, physically back to life.  His body was fully functioning, after all he cooked and ate fish; but it was a body transformed into the fullness of new creation.

This was not what was expected.

Just as Jesus  was the light at the end of the tunnel for her, just as Isaiah’s words were the light at the end of the tunnel for the those who read them and understood them; so is Jesus resurrection for His disciples, then and now.

Just look at the difference it made to the disciples.  They had seen Him heal the sick like this woman, they’d seen Him raise Lazarus from the dead, free others from oppression, but they did not expect Him to be raised from the dead.  It changed everything!

It meant resurrection life is possible in the here and now.  It meant He really was the Messiah, really was God; so when He said that those who are in Him will do greater things they believed Him; when He said they would be filled with His Spirit they waited in the place He told them and when it happened they went out to tell the world.

We have been duped by dualism that says this earth will be fully destroyed and by Gnosticism that thinks when we die we spend eternity in some disembodied state, floating around heaven. We’ve been tricked by ideas that God can’t move in the way He did in the New Testament. These things cause us to be despairing to be overcome by the cares of life, to be like the woman in Luke who was bent over double, staring at the ground for years.

BUT - His resurrection makes a difference to us too.  Because of it He is alive and we can be alive in Him, that is fully live in His resurrection life. Because He has sent His Spirit to indwell us we can become the human beings we are created to be. He told us to pray for God’s Kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven and because of His Resurrection life in us we become the implementers of this.

We are able to live way these verses in Isaiah tell us to.

His Life, Death and Resurrection are the light at the end of the tunnel for us; they show us life doesn’t have to be what we expected; it is better.

It is better in the here and now and we are to make it better for others and after a time of death we too will be resurrected in our full functioning physical bodies to live in the restored new creation of earth.  That’s exciting.

So as we come to the table this morning, let’s be willing to meet with the risen Jesus, ready for Him to heal, free and satisfy us.  Let His body and blood heal and free us from the past, cleanse us. Lets welcome Him and let His resurrection life give us new life, make us new creations now; truly image-bearers of God, able and willing to live fully and abundantly in Him.